Stop at Nothing

by Tammy Cohen

  As I was thinking about it, a neat figure in a close-fitting black tracksuit with a subtle fuchsia flash on the lower outside leg jogged towards us, long, sleek ponytail swinging.

  ‘Tessa!’

  Nita extracted her headphones from her ears while jogging on the spot. Aside from a faint pink flush on her smooth cheeks, there was no other indication that she’d just run up one of the steepest hills in London.

  ‘Nita!’

  I got to my feet and stepped towards her.

  ‘Oh God, don’t come too near. I’m all sweaty and disgusting and I probably stink.’

  She was none of those things.

  As I sat back down, my mind was racing ahead, trying to think of how to introduce Frances without giving away how deeply embroiled in the fallout of Emma’s abduction I’d allowed myself to become. Instinctively, I knew Nita would disapprove. I remembered that WhatsApp chat, that stinging accusation that I was getting off on the drama of it all.

  But now Nita was eyeing Frances expectantly.

  ‘This is Frances,’ I said, slapping a smile on to my face like a sticker. ‘My friend.’

  I felt Frances stiffen beside me.

  ‘Hello,’ she said in an off-hand voice, quite unlike her usual one. I glanced over and saw that she wasn’t even looking at Nita but was concentrating on a point on the table that she was scraping with her thumbnail.

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘Well,’ said Nita, hopping from side to side. ‘Better press on. I’m doing the half marathon in a couple of weeks.’ This last was addressed to Frances. ‘Raising money for Macmillan nurses. My mother has terminal cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  The words were friendly but the tone was flat. Disinterested, even.

  ‘Right then. Offski!’ Nita, who was one of those people who prided themselves on knowing the appropriate thing to say in any given situation, was not used to encountering indifference.

  After I’d watched her jog away, ponytail swinging angrily, I turned back to Frances.

  ‘Hope you didn’t mind me introducing you as a friend. I didn’t really want to get into it. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Of course. I completely understand.’

  But she still sounded subdued and, just a few minutes later, she told me she needed to be going. Her mum was having a bad spell and she didn’t like to be away from her longer than necessary.

  ‘You’re a good person, Frances,’ I said, putting my hand on her arm. ‘Not many people your age would put their own life on the back burner to look after their parents.’

  I thought about my own mum and dad and how it had been weeks since I’d seen them, and I felt a warm flush of shame.

  ‘Oh, I don’t do much, really. Besides, it’s the least I can do after everything she did for me, bringing me up single-handedly after my dad died. She’s been brilliant.’

  ‘You do make sure you have time for you, though, don’t you?’ I persevered. ‘Time to hang out with your friends, and enjoy being young?’

  Frances nodded. ‘Oh yes, definitely. Well, I mean, my best friend, Claudia, moved away quite recently so I don’t go out as much as I did. But that suits me, really. I’m a home-bird at heart. Anyway, you have enough on your plate without worrying about me.’

  Frances was heading back home, in the opposite direction to the way I was walking. She’d gone a few steps before turning back.

  ‘You will think about what I said, won’t you, Tessa? About telling the police what’s been going on? You might have your privacy settings on, but what about your friends, your family? You’d be amazed how much someone could piece together from all the different parts of your life.’

  Walking home with Dotty, the fear and anxiety I’d felt that morning while scanning through my Facebook feed returned as I imagined scenarios where one or other daughter woke up to threats, or else damning messages about their mother. I pictured Rosie as I’d seen her the day before. She’d been about to make a move towards me, I was sure of it. The first step towards a reconciliation. Getting caught up in something like this would kill any chances of that happening. How could I have been so stupid?

  On impulse, I didn’t take the normal route home, instead diverting via Wood Green, which took us up the main high road from Wood Green station, past the fast-food restaurants and the minicab companies.

  I usually avoided going this way, and deliberately kept my face averted from the junction outside the Tube. Even so, I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead and a cold, clammy dread building. As I passed, I could hear in my head the sickening crunch of metal on metal. I quickened my pace but the sounds followed me. A girl crying in great, tearing sobs. A man’s voice shouting. The deafening thunder of my own heart in my ears.

  I stopped a few hundred yards up the road in front of a charity-shop window and bent my head, trying to shake the memories loose from my head, like I was getting water out of my ear after a swim.

  This route also happened to pass the police station, housed in a former pub on a corner between the timber yard and the depressing-looking civic centre. This wasn’t the kind of station to encourage public drop-ins. In fact, unless you knew where to look, you probably wouldn’t even notice it was there. The car park in front obscured the Metropolitan Police noticeboard and the doors were locked, with no visible means of entry. It was on the closures list, I’d been told. Soon there’d be no police stations left.

  Standing outside in the tiny car park with my phone in my hand, I made a bargain with myself. If Detective Byrne was here, I’d tell him everything and not hold back. But if he wasn’t, well, at least I’d have tried. And I could go home and deactivate my social media accounts and just focus on being a good mother to my girls and keeping my head down and earning some money.

  One hand absently stroking Dotty and trying to calm her down, I scrolled through my contacts until I found Detective Byrne. Took a deep breath.

  He was there.

  Five minutes later I was sitting opposite him on a plastic bucket chair in that anonymous open-plan office that could have been any office anywhere in the country, with the dark blue carpet and the cheap grey desks and the bulky desktop computers that looked ten years out of date. We were next to the window, which had slatted white blinds, allowing me to keep an eye on Dotty, who was tied up outside and staring balefully at the door through which I’d disappeared, as if she might will me back out again.

  I started, hesitantly, to tell him what had been happening. To my own irritation, I could hear myself apologizing in advance for what I was about to tell him, making jokes at my own expense. ‘Call it a mad, middle-aged menopausal moment,’ I said at one point. I was minimizing it, trivializing it, as I had a tendency to do when talking to people I didn’t know well, even though I knew, fundamentally, that this was neither minimal nor trivial.

  Why did I do that?

  I was telling him about the door I’d seen James Stephens emerge from, the one opposite the Tube. I was looking for some kind of recognition in the policeman’s eyes. Some confirmation. A way of making Detective Byrne complicit in what was going on. Instead, he held up a hand.

  ‘Whoah. Let me stop you right there.’ I noticed for the first time an angry, pink patch of psoriasis on his wrist, the skin raised and scaly. ‘I thought we’d been through this before, Mrs Hopwood. I cannot tell you the address of a man who has not been charged with any offence and who your daughter failed to pick out of a line-up.’

  I stopped, nonplussed.

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘And please remember that eight out of the nine men in that video were recruited from all around the country. Only one, the man captured on the CCTV from the bus, is local.’

  Something must have shown in my eyes, because he instantly corrected himself.

  ‘I mean, might be local.’

  I was so exhilarated by his unwitting confirmation that the suspect lived locally that I wasn’t thinking properly.

>   ‘It’s definitely him. Frances has already identified him.’

  The change in Detective Byrne’s demeanour was instant. Gone was the gentle, tired smile. And in its place an expression of the utmost seriousness. His eyes, without their usual crinkled fan of laughter lines, appeared hard and unnervingly direct. For a moment I thought I could see how intimidating he might seem to a newly arrested criminal or a suspect brought in for questioning.

  ‘Frances Gates is involved in this? Let me tell you something, Mrs Hopwood, we do not condone vigilante-style behaviour in any way, shape or form. If you or your daughter have had threats made against you, rest assured, we will take them very seriously. However, if you start taking the law into your own hands and roping in a witness in order to harass a member of the public, we would also have to take that very seriously. Do I make myself clear?’

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I found I couldn’t meet Detective Byrne’s eyes, so I focused instead on looking through the window at Dotty, who had given up her vigil at the door and was lying down in an attitude of abject misery.

  Detective Byrne showed me out.

  ‘It’s not that I’m not sympathetic, Mrs Hopwood,’ he said as he held the door open. ‘Believe me, we are as keen as you are to get the scumbag who attacked your daughter. But without a positive ID there is really nothing more we can do. The best thing you can do for Emma is to put this all behind you and move on with your lives. Agreed?’

  I nodded and shook his outstretched hand, which encompassed mine like a baseball glove, rigid and strong.

  When I bent to unclip Dotty, I was mortified to find I hadn’t actually tied her up. I’d looped the lead around the railing then pulled it through the handle but had forgotten to clip it on to her collar.

  Idiot, I muttered under my breath. As I straightened up and turned to leave, I saw that Detective Byrne was still standing there, watching me through the glass.

  15

  It used to take an hour and twenty minutes to drive to my parents’ house.

  Over the years I’d been making the journey from north London to north Oxford I’d travelled in torrential rain, in snow, once in extreme heat that had us pulling on to the hard shoulder, black smoke belching from the engine.

  I’d driven there on my own in the early hours, doing ninety miles an hour on the empty road, listening to hush-toned radio DJs hosting late-night call-ins, and I’d sat in bank-holiday jams with Rosie and Emma, singing along to Amy Winehouse at the top of our voices.

  In the early days with Phil, we’d drive with our hands clamped to one another’s thighs, chatting about everything and nothing, a far cry from the silence of the later trips, both of us wrapped up in our petty resentments, our relentless point-scoring, the distance between us as wide as the motorway itself.

  In between those points were all the times we’d driven with babies, slumped in their car seats, heads lolling, plump lips still sheened with milk, and with squirming toddlers fractiously trying to free themselves from restraining belts. We’d had the years of squabbling in the back seat, with Rosie drawing an invisible line down the middle and complaining every time Em put a toe or a finger over it. Then the years of headphones plugged firmly into ears, lost in their own thoughts and the anthems of their lives.

  Since I’d got rid of the car, I missed those journeys. Sealed up together without escape, I’d had some of my most open conversations with my daughters, boredom and proximity combining to tease out secrets and mend bridges. Now we took the train, which doubled the travel time when you included the Tube journey and the bus the other end.

  At least today I’d managed to bag a table seat. It was Mother’s Day and the carriage was full of men self-consciously clutching bunches of flowers and elderly women dressed in their Sunday best. I was sitting next to Em, who had her headphones in. I asked what she was listening to and she obligingly took one earbud out and gave it to me by way of reply.

  Johnny Cash was playing, which surprised me, although it probably shouldn’t have. My children were constantly revealing layers I couldn’t even guess at. And besides, everything comes full circle in the end. Even Johnny.

  After the song finished we chatted about this and that, nothing important, but I was glad to see Em was in a relaxed mood, hardly touching her hair. Even though the car, traditionally, was the place my children had allowed themselves to be most unguarded, physically close but without embarrassing eye contact, the train still came a close second.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ I asked her. ‘About what happened?’

  We still didn’t refer to the attack directly, only in the most oblique terms. What happened. That thing. The incident. As if not naming it might make it easier to forget.

  Gaze fixed on her phone screen, Em shrugged.

  ‘Okay, I guess. I mean, I still think about it sometimes, especially since I saw him that time in the street. But then I tell myself he was just visiting, or it wasn’t even him at all, and I try to forget it.’

  ‘And do you talk to anyone about it? Your friends?’ I hesitated. ‘Frances?’

  Em whipped around to glance at me, as if trying to guess how I’d found out, before returning her attention to the screen again.

  ‘Sometimes. She was there, you know. So she kind of understands.’

  That was typical Em. Worrying I’d be hurt that she’d confided in someone else instead of me.

  ‘It’s all right, Em. I’m just glad you have someone you can talk to. Though you know you can always talk to me, don’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Are you still having nightmares about it?’

  ‘Not really.’ She swallowed audibly. ‘Only sometimes.’

  I pressed my lips together, suddenly conscious of a painful lump in my throat. She was being so brave. But it killed me that she felt she had to be.

  Emma said something quietly that I didn’t catch, so I asked her to repeat it.

  ‘I said, I wish they’d caught him. I wish I’d just said it was him. You know, Number Eight, or whatever he was. Even if I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure, I wish I’d said it anyway. I hate the thought that he’s still out there, maybe even living around the corner.’

  For a moment I was tempted to admit I knew exactly where he lived. But then I remembered my last meeting with Detective Byrne and realized it would do more harm than good for her to know that he was so close by and that we were powerless to do anything about it. She didn’t travel by herself after dark any more, and he was hardly going to target her in broad daylight. Better not to freak her out more than she already was.

  So I kept quiet and watched out of the train window as anger calcified inside my chest.

  My parents lived on a modern executive housing estate in north Oxford in a house they’d bought off-plan in the mid-1980s when it would still have been possible to buy a beautiful rambling Victorian villa around the corner for the same money, a fact that could still make me weep all these years on.

  As always, I had to steel myself before going inside, pulling in all my core muscles like we were taught to do in Pilates, trying to make myself inviolate.

  Even though a cleaner went in once a week, at my insistence, and an agency carer came daily to get Mum up and prepare food, the house still smelled bad – a combination of the heating kept on too high for too long, lax personal hygiene and a nursery-food diet – overboiled vegetables and tinned mushroom soup.

  ‘Here we are!’ said my dad, rushing into the hall to meet us.

  I watched my parents most days on the webcam at home but it wasn’t until I saw them in the flesh that I properly noticed the physical changes they had undergone since the last time I visited them. Dad had a nick on his skin-saggy chin where he’d cut himself shaving, and the stiffness I’d noticed on the webcam was pronounced. My eyes filled with tears, and I had to quickly step forward to hug him so he wouldn’t notice.

  Dad had trained as a hydraulic engineer and later in his career had travelled the world, a
dvising private companies and local authorities on the design of water-treatment plants. As a child I’d kept a diary, where I wrote down bits of news so I wouldn’t have forgotten them by the time he got home from wherever he’d gone. ‘I can see why that would upset you,’ he’d say solemnly when I related some trivial or imagined slight perpetrated by one of my friends from school. From the earliest age, he’d made me feel like someone who deserved to be taken seriously. Only now could I see what a great gift that had been.

  ‘How is she?’ I asked him now.

  ‘Oh, you know. Good days and bad days.’

  My mother was sitting in her chair in the living room watching Midsomer Murders on the television. There had been occasions over the last couple of years where I’d gone in and she hadn’t recognized me at all. One time I’d taken Em and Mum had looked her up and down with an expression of the greatest contempt, before asking, ‘Who, or what, is that?’

  Today, though, she seemed to know who we were – well, apart from confusing Em with Rosie. But then I did that sometimes.

  Used to do that.

  ‘Happy Mother’s Day,’ I said, plastering on a jolly smile and pressing a small, wrapped parcel containing an unimaginative woollen scarf into my mum’s hands.

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ she said, beaming. ‘Good journey?’

  It was what she always said on her better days. One of the stock phrases she’d memorized to trot out when people came round. No longer able to empathize, she had to search for cues in social interactions – people appearing in the living room greeting her with a smile, or a particular tone of voice dipping or an expectant pause in the conversation, during which she might interject, ‘Well, we must wait and see,’ or ‘We must hope for the best,’ or, if someone sounded more upbeat, ‘That’s nice.’ Innocuous phrases she’d learned by heart so that she could still participate in life.

  As ever, my heart contracted with pity and regret at the sight of her, even as I curled my fingers into my palms in irritation, noticing how she was stealthily increasing the volume on the remote control. This was the story now of my relationship with my mother, sympathy and frustration existing simultaneously so my emotions lurched from side to side like the bubble on a spirit level.